EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 26 - Utopian Virtual
Genre of the Day - Utopian Virtual
Album of the Day - Far Side Virtual by James Ferraro (2011)
May 26, 2024
As a twenty year old, I look back to my experience on the Internet as a child in the late 2000s and wonder if today’s kids still feel the World Wide Web to be a universe of unbridled possibility. My sister and I dabbled in an endless sea of online games and content, and I do feel that my early years on the Internet were filled with joy and curiosity. I mostly doubt it; the echo-chamber algorithms of TikTok and YouTube Shorts create such an inherently different user experience from the act of opening an empty browser, thinking of what games or music intrigued us, and setting off on a journey from there. On today’s social media (and among some of its biggest musical stars), people who grew up around that same time and earlier remember the open expanses of Windows ‘94 grass and the aquatic, glossy sheen that once defined the user experience, before the design aesthetics caught up to the times in the early 2010s and sleek, one-dimensional modernism superseded an experience that had once felt so interdimensional. That shift reflected the changing tides of what the Internet had become as the 1990s’ shining vision of progress had noticeably devolved into a beacon of corporatism, a catalyst for misinformation literacy, and a forum for anonymized hate.
Casual admirers and dedicated archivists fawn over the many design aesthetics that once populated the Internet and defined its visual interfaces, like these excellent curated collections by architect Evan Collins. Consider the abstract, wacky computer-generated geometry of the “Silicon Dreams” aesthetic or the bamboo-equals-environmentalism of “Zen-X.” They recall a once-prevalent sentiment that the Internet promised a certain online global unity, and coffee and computers mingled at Internet cafés. While the obsession with these visions of the Internet as it was might have more to say about our nostalgia and projection, the yearning to recapture cyber-utopianism rather than the malaise of the digital trash heap remains potent.
This is the ideological ethos that drives a musical take on that nostalgia called Utopian Virtual. While vaporwave was derived similarly, as we talked about in the dreampunk article, it doesn’t rely as much on the Japanese aesthetics that many vaporwave and derived genres use as a form of mystique and anonymity. Though it aims to directly call back to the sounds of video games, muzak and corpo-rock, and Internet sounds of the 1990s and 2000s, Utopian Virtual focuses more on original compositions rather than the manipulation of samples that predominates vaporwave. Sampling assists in densifying a composition, and Utopian Virtual stretches in the opposite direction by creating a more authentically tacky sound with unvarnished MIDI presets. Utopian Virtual artists have also played around in more uncanny compositions that reflect an online hellscape or in the other direction with synthpop tunes. Though they’re not technically in the Utopian Virtual sonic arena, its ideas reverberate among recent popular artists like Pinkpantheress and Deaton Chris Anthony who have similarly played around with aestheticized online nostalgia.
James Ferraro was an early forerunner of Utopian Virtual and the genre’s namesake with his 2011 project “Far Side Virtual.” To codify a nostalgia-based genre relatively early into the period when the Internet era it references was just far enough behind to be seen through such a wistful lens is quite a feat. He achieves it through a meticulous dedication to soundscape while preserving the songs’ ability to stand on their own as compositions. Unexpected accoutrements simulate the sudden pop-ups of an aughts computer, like the startup sound that wraps up the zippy “Linden Dollars.” The staccato synthesized sitar (try saying that three times fast, seriously) of “Global Lunch” recalls the clumsily globalist outlook of Internet utopianism. As someone who was a kid when the Burj Khalifa was erected, the city setting of “Dubai Dream Tone” deftly evokes a nostalgic feeling for the vision of global progress presented to my generation. Other songs feature touches of automated voices from video games like the automated restaurant workers of “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi, and Dream Sushi.” There’s no emphasis on blending them in smoothly. This not only simulates real game play, but like the simple bell-like piano, icy synths, cheapo drum programming, and robotic choir voices that make up the instrumentation, it’s a testament to the hope of cyber-utopia despite the actual limits of the technology.